Microsoft holds summer school on natural language processing

Bangalore, May 3 (UNI) Microsoft Research India, in a bid to enthuse Computer Science students take up post graduate courses, today commenced a Summer School in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science here on 'Natural Language Processing'.

With hardly 35 post graduate students in Computer Science across the country, Information Technology research in India was suffering a serious manpower problem with bright students across the engineering fraternity hijacked by the IT Companies. The Summer School was a bid to encourage bright students take up research in advanced computing techniques.

Microsoft Research India Strategy Director Vidya Natampally told newsmen here that the school has attracted 65 students across the country. As many as 125 had applied.

Microsoft Research India Head for Multilingual systems A Kumaran said that during the two-and-a-half week school the budding engineers would be given an insight into various aspects of natural language processing and encourage them to take up research in any one of the topics. Each topic by itself would need deep study.

Indian Institute of Science Associate Director Prof N Balakrishnan said that with the Indian languages providing a complex situation for processing any headway made would help processing of wealth of knowledge and data in Indian languages. He said that development of software tools to process the languages could also result in earning good revenue by IT sector.

On Natural language processing, he said only a handful of institutes of higher learning across the country had the necessary faculty. "Out of 35 post graduate students in Computer Science, hardly two or three would be in this subject," he lamented. He regretted that bright students were taken away by the IT companies and students hardly realise the importance of Research in IT and the future prospects.

Mr Kumaran said that 18 lecturers, including eight from abroad would be participating in the Summer School where each day a topic would be discussed. Participants would also have an opportunity to have hands on experience at labs on various tools being developed.

UNI